The invention relates to a rattle or noise maker, particularly for use by spectators at sporting events.
At sporting events, exuberant spectators express their enthusiasm by cheering, clapping and/or making loud noises with many different types of noise makers such as whistles, horns etc. A common type of noisemaker in Europe is a rotatable rattle which has a handle for gripping by the operator and a rotor which can be made to rotate about the handle by moving the handle in small circles. The handle has a toothed portion connected thereto, and the rotor is journalled on the handle and has a vane which sweeps the toothed portion as the rotor rotates so as to generate a harsh rattling noise. Rattles of this type are commonly made from several pieces of wood which require careful cutting followed by careful assembly. To the inventor's knowledge, a simplest, least costly rattle has a single set of teeth secured to a handle, and an integral rotor and vane, which requires a minimum of three separate parts which are assembled, and when so assembled cannot be separated easily. Because the parts are subjected to some considerable forces during use, a relatively high quality wood must be used and the parts must be fabricated accurately. These strict requirements tend to increase the cost of the item and any attempts to reduce the cost by reducing the quality of wood and manufacturing results in inferior performance and/or a relatively short life of the rattle.
While the least costly rattle has a single toothed portion and a single vane, an improved noise can be generated by providing at least two vanes which engage one or two sets of teeth in the toothed portion in such a way that an impact generated by one vane is followed very closely by an impact generated from the other vane. Some twin vane rattles produce a complex noise of different tones which is more interesting than the single vane rattle, but these necessarily require a more complex structure, thus resulting in a higher cost.